No results for you today (followed by the sound by the sound of a million browsers clicking their “back” button – wait, did I say a million? I meant, like, fifty), but there is a whole buttload of rider news. So sit back relax and enjoy, and we’ll start with the sprinters: Robbie McEwen got sucker punched (scroll down) at a motorsport event in Australia. McEwen was acosted by a bunch of dudes, decked with a king hit (apparently, the Australian version of a haymaker), before hauling tail out of there. Usurprisingly, he was way faster than the other guys. Recent retiree and divorcé Mario Cipollini was just eliminated from the Italian version of Dancing with the Stars. Bummer for Re Leone, but he can take heart in the fact that he made it far further on the show than he ever did at the Tour de France. Stefan van Dijk’s similarity to Homer Simpson apparently doesn’t stop at the forehead. VanDijk “missed” (scroll down) a dope test by tearing off in his car when he saw the dope tester’s vehicle in the driveway. What’s that got to do with homer? See Reason 204. The doctor saw van Dijk, though, and now the Dutch rider must serve a one-year suspension, though the penalty is lighter than the two years he might have otherwise gotten.
Van Dijk’s squad for 2006, Unibet, won’t miss their star sprinter too much, as they’ve already signed Baden Cooke, and are currently after Stuart O’Grady as well. Unibet’s also inked Carlos Quesada, who took 5th in this year’s Vuelta, as a GC threat. Too bad as a Dutch team without ProTour status, the biggest stage race they’re gonna be doing is the ENECO Tour, which sadly, doesn’t have any hills. Team CSC, however, will be in attendance at all three Grand Tours (yes, the kind with hills) next season, and have listed the prospetive GC candidates for each. While Basso for the ’06 Tour and Sastre for the ’06 Giro certianly aren’t surprises, CSC’s choice of Christian Vandevelde to lead their ’06 Giro campaign certainly is. Team Manager Bjarne Riis kinda dissed Vandevelde by saying it “won’t be the podium we are talking about,” but still, that’s big news from the friendly, yet whiny, Velonews diarist. A former Giro contender, Dario Frigo finally got sentenced today for possesing dope at the 2001 event. Under Italian law doping is “Sporting Fraud,” and Frigo will be recieving a six-month suspended sentence and 12,000 Euro fine. At the current rate of exponential deceleration being expressed by the Italian court system, Frigo’s doping offense from this summer (scroll down), should be finished by, oh, 2014.